Michael Gira spearheads transformation of Swans

Swans shows weren't always communions between artist and listener. Back in the '80s, Michael Gira's dark, experimental New York-based rock band made provocative music and sometimes performed it in an antagonistic manner, locking concertgoers inside venues and cutting the air conditioning.

Today, the music made by Swans remains darkly somber, but the shows have taken on a euphoric quality. They build slowly and invite movement, with Gira leading his band and fans through a stirring ritual. Gira also will be the guy at the merch table after the show, the one in the cowboy hat greeting fans. A 21st-century Swans show is more shared experience than straight performance of songs.

Swans transformation has been fascinating. Gira started Swans in the early 1980s as an uncompromising experimental rock band. He put Swans on ice in the late-'90s to pursue quieter music with a new band, Angels of Light, only to return to Swans in 2010.

Reunions have become de rigueur in rock 'n' roll - and they typically involve the creation of new music that fails to match a band's earlier output. But under Gira's direction, the revived Swans hasn't undermined its past. Instead, the group is making its best music. And Gira isn't stooping to court listeners: "The Seer," released in 2012, and the new "To Be Kind" are imposing recordings, each two hours long. Yet they're experiential, beautifully constructed and dense albums that can envelop a listener willing to give them the time and attention.

More Information

Swans

With Xiu Xiu

When: 8 p.m. Saturday

Where: Fitzgerald's, 2706 White Oak

Tickets: $21-$25;

In this sense, Swans isn't a band for the dollar-a-song download era, making fleeting music for short attention spans. Despite bucking that trend, the group is more popular now than ever.

"That's what I look for in music or art or literature," Gira says, matter of factly. "I like to completely lose myself in it."

Gira remains tirelessly progressive. Even though "To Be Kind" is only a few weeks old, he's already moved past the album. A few of the compositions will find their way into the band's show at Fitzgerald's Saturday, but they've evolved into new forms. "I don't want to be in a karaoke act," Gira says. He mentions three new songs, each of them 15 minutes long, that have been integrated into the set.

"I can't hear the new record, it feels like dead meat to me," he says, laughing. "I can't relate to it. I think it's decent, whatever. But if you work on something so much, at some point it just becomes devoid of blood."

Because Gira feels no affinity for the recording doesn't mean it's not a striking piece of music. Time disappears when "To Be Kind" plays. The compositions lurch and recede, lyrics cycle through repetitively more like chants than anything as pop formal as verses and choruses.

Translator

To read this article in one of Houston's most-spoken languages, click on the button below.

Andrew Dansby

Gira circles themes wolflike rather than attacking directly. Two words get used a lot on the album: one is "love" and the other is unprintable here, both suggesting acts of surrender. Gira's song domain is not that of girls and cars. "Nothing wrong with them," he says, with a dry chuckle, "but I don't find those subjects that interesting. The Beach Boys covered that - to great effect."

More representative is the earthy "Bring the Sun/Toussaint L'Ouverture," a 34-minute song informed in part by Gira's reading about the Haitian revolutionary. His manner is not to read the bio then write a song about a historical figure, but rather create a swelling and cathartic piece of music that suggests a tortured place with a rich culture and fascinating history that ties into our own. Gira points out that a L'Ouverture-led resistance bankrupted Napoleon and helped set up the Louisiana Purchase: A seemingly self-contained island as part of a larger global ecosystem. Also an island that has suffered immensely.

"It's such a mess, completely deforested," Gira says. "You have poor people cutting down trees for firewood for cooking. And now, when it rains, it's just a disaster. A pit of disease and despair. But it's also a place with a lot of magic."

On "Just a Little Boy (For Chester Burnett)" Gira similarly takes a more abstract approach to a historical figure, this time the blues great better known as Howlin' Wolf.

The song has a deep groove that suggests the blues, though it's hardly a three-minute baby-done-left-me recitation from tradition. Like Wolf, Gira projects different voices in the song, moving from eerily childish as he repeats "I'm just a little boy" to a lonesome moan that blows through "I need looooove."

"He was so full of lust and joy," Gira says. "He had to be a showman, even early on. That's one of the things that set him apart from other people - that, obviously, and the incredible voice. Showmanship was everything to that dude."